Author: Omerta

Hey guys! It has been an exciting 3 weeks since my last dev diary. We have had our hands full working on London 2038 and celebrating the holidays with our families

First of all, I would like to welcome a new member to the team, SanGawku! He comes to us with experience in private server development and has already contributed to bugfixes and process improvements. We are glad to have him!

I mentioned in my last update that http://london2038.com would be coming soon; this is still the case–look out for an announcement of the new website with dedicated places for information on the project.

There are some updates on what has been fixed and new bugs discovered, but first, a little home movie I made…

Shulgoth Eats Lead

All of us have been hard at work addressing the issues that were known at the time of the last dev diary. Many small issues were fixed since then due to the hard work and dedication of our development team. Some additional issues have also been discovered since then as well, mainly due to our ability to test in a more in-depth way.

Party member inspection from the party member portrait does not function

Embankment Redoubt quest cannot be completed due to bug in handling AI for the NPC soldiers in the quest.

Some item affixes are show twice but applied only once

Some specific named monster hunt quests cause issues in parties

Item linking has known bugs and is being fixed/improved

What’s Next

We are at a point where a few bugs remain which can cause the game to be instantly unplayable and are working hard to fix them. This means we are not quite to an Alpha state stability-wise, but at the same time our server is playable enough to get some productive testing done. So going forward, our main goals are to address the remaining known game breaking bugs, and attempt to thoroughly test the server in preparation for a small closed Alpha stage. I will update the community as soon as we are ready to take applications to become Alpha testers.

We are also working on strengthening our tooling and processes as we work towards accommodating more and more players as we expand our testing efforts.

Something to note: London 2038 will NEVER cost money, will NEVER have anything for purchase, will NEVER have a subscription, will NEVER have a cash shop or money transactions of any kind, PERIOD. This is a passion project for fans, by fans, and has 0 money involved. We are all volunteers, and we want everyone to enjoy the game we remember with out any cost EVER. No one will EVER make money off of this project.

Hey guys! A lot has happened since my last dev diary. The team is still working hard, we’ve garnered some press attention for the project, and a name has been chosen for the project as well!

First, some housekeeping: after opening a poll to name the project, the favorite choice by far was London 2038! From now on, that is the official name of the Multiplayer reboot of Hellgate: London Look for a new website at http://london2038.com soon!

There are some updates on what has been fixed and new bugs discovered, but first, a teaser…

Stonehenge in all its glory

Work has continued on the main issues remaining; namely our data woes. We, mainly through the genius of MMan and MarCNeT, addressed many of the bugs in the first development diary entry and have a much more stable build to test with. However, issues still remain which can crash our server, cause unexpected behavior, or otherwise make the game unplayable. All in all though, we are moving at a slow but steady pace towards an Alpha-testable state of our server. Here is an updated list of what does work and what needs work:

In addition to addressing bugs in our current build, we are also working on some developer tools related to the game data that should provide some boost in productivity around fixing data-related bugs. We will be continuing our work trudging through the data alignment issues we have faced, as well as addressing and documenting any other bugs that crop up during test sessions. We are also working on automation and standardization to make our lives easier and to ease the transition out of closed development to a pre-alpha stage.

Something to note: London 2038 will NEVER cost money, will NEVER have anything for purchase, will NEVER have a subscription, will NEVER have a cash shop or money transactions of any kind, PERIOD. This is a passion project for fans, by fans, and has 0 money involved. We are all volunteers, and we want everyone to enjoy the game we remember with out any cost EVER. No one will EVER make money off of this project.

Hey guys! This is going to be the first of many developer logs and status updates on the ongoing effort to reboot the Hellgate multiplayer experience… but first, a teaser

Hellgate Multiplayer Working On Development Server:

Status As of 11/29/2016

As seen above, we have a working Hellgate: London multiplayer server running. At this point, Hellgate multiplayer WILL be returning to the community. It has taken months of work, dedication, blood, sweat, and tears to get to this point, but we are at a point where development is accelerating and we are able to actually debug a running MP server.

Something to note: London 2038 will NEVER cost money, will NEVER have anything for purchase, will NEVER have a subscription, will NEVER have a cash shop or money transactions of any kind, PERIOD. This is a passion project for fans, by fans, and has 0 money involved. We are all volunteers, and we want everyone to enjoy the game we remember with out any cost EVER. No one will EVER make money off of this project.

We currently have 4-5 developers actively working on this project; myself, MMan, and MarCNeT being the principal developers at this point. Things are still at a very tentative stage where bugs are both discovered and squashed daily (sometimes hourly ). See below for a rough list of what works and what doesn’t:

Random issues with monsters/bosses pausing the server due to data errors (see first item)

What’s Next

We are actively working on fixing the known bugs, testing the current version, reporting bugs, and recruiting developers. Check back on this subforum for more dev diaries, I will post as appropriate. Development on the issues listed in the “don’t work” list above are our #1 priority–there is a consensus that the work being done on the data will alleviate a lot of current bugs/weirdness. Keep your eyes peeled for more info to come!

Please feel free to join the discord server, especially if you are a developer (and if you are, check out the wiki).